Counting Crows

August and Everything After

Review

From the tentative, almost nervous opening of near silence of Round Here, you think this album will be different, and when, from the quiet, you hear the near poetic eloquence of the first lyrics you know you were right...

Step out the front door like a ghost
into the fog where no one notices
the contrast of white on white.

and so it continues, a fragile, introspective look at life. And the word fragile seems so apt, seems to sum up the whole of the album. With the often understated music, and the flowing words, that often appear not to have been written, but just to be, they stick in your memory as if you'd always known them. You feel such a closeness to the emotions and stories portrayed in the songs, that even if you haven't experienced them they still move you.

And with the first single Mr Jones, you have such a tale of dreams, that you empathise so much with Adam Duritz (lead singer) that you almost forget that the song isn't about you, but someone you never met, probably never even will, and that fact always escapes you all through the album, you feel you're there, the songs were written for you or, you wish, by you.

Raining in Baltimore, a piano and vocal based piece seems to highlight the strengths of the group, turning such simplistic lyrics, into an emotive, almost haunting track. A track of such understated beauty that it almost overwhelms, but as throughout the album, the vocals manage to retain the control, and without doubt, it becomes the track that symbolises the essence of the album, being alone, or together, people can always be distant, you can be lost a long way from home, or you can be lost at home, it doesn't matter, you're still lost.

But from the understatement, comes an energy, a vibrance, and if anyone was unsure as to the abilities of the group, the final track, A Murder of One, just shows how they can rock, a classic album track, a better live one, from the opening guitar to the closing words, a song of sheer brilliance...

I walk along these hillsides
In the summer 'neath the sunshine
I am feathered by the moonlight falling down on me

Stand-out tracks

• Round Here
• Mr Jones
• Anna Begins
• Raining in Baltimore
• A Murder of One

Score 10/10

Page last updated on 12th November 1998

Maintained by Julian Fletcher (julian@innocent.com)